Wikipedia's secret agent: CIA role in 'moderating' online Encyclopedia

Larry Sanger says intelligence agencies have been exerting control over the online encyclopedia for over ten years.

Speaking on Greenwald’s ‘System Update’ podcast, Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has accused the "US liberal establishment and intelligence community" of using the site for "information warfare," as reported by Global Village Space.

He has told journalist Glenn Greenwald that the platform he helped create has become an instrument of control for what he described as "left-liberal entities", including the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies.

Sanger highlighted that evidence suggests CIA and FBI computers were used as early as 2008 to edit Wikipedia articles. This activity was first brought to light in 2007 by a programming student named Virgil Griffith, who developed a program called WikiScanner to track edits made from certain locations.

CIA computers were involved in removing casualty counts from the Iraq War, and an FBI machine was used to erase aerial and satellite images of the US prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Additionally, CIA computers were responsible for editing numerous articles, including those related to then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, China's nuclear program, and the Argentine navy, as per Sanger.

“[The intelligence agencies] pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they’re already mostly in line with, or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community, learn the Wikipedia game, and then push what they want to say with their own people,” Sanger told Greenwald.

“A great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online,” he stressed, “on websites like Wikipedia.”

It was found that these intelligence agencies and major corporations were scrubbing Wikipedia of incriminating information. Sanger added that the agencies manipulate the content by paying off influential individuals or developing their own talent within the intelligence community.

Elsewhere in his remarks, he divulged that intelligence and information warfare have a significant online component, with platforms like Wikipedia being utilized for these purposes.

Read next: Twitter, Fb, TikTok, more are run by the FBI, CIA, and NATO

Sanger's allegations echo other instances where major online platforms were allegedly influenced or manipulated by intelligence agencies to control narratives and censor certain content.

The pro-#Palestine accounts were constantly trying to block a sudden influx of suspicious followers on #Twitter. Some experts said this could "degrade the algorithmic quality of a Twitter account so that it possibly gets suspended," thus, censored. pic.twitter.com/TotB8e9aIU

Earlier this year, Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), disclosed a collection of documents revealing that the platform's former executives collaborated with the FBI to eliminate content the agency sought to conceal.

The documents also indicated that Twitter assisted the US military in online influence campaigns and engaged in censorship of "anti-Ukraine narratives" on behalf of various US intelligence agencies. Similarly, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook, the largest social media platform globally, censored accurate information that could harm President Joe Biden's 2020 election campaign, following a direct request from the FBI.

Read next: Gag rule on Palestinians continues, TikTok joins ban policy